


From Pieces Of Broken Memory

by GideonGraystairs



Series: Tumblr Fics [12]
Category: Shadowhunters (TV), The Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare, The Shadowhunter Chronicles - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Angst, Depression, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Major character death - Freeform, Medication, Mental Health Issues, Or not, Read However You Like, Schizophrenia, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-18
Updated: 2017-05-18
Packaged: 2018-11-02 07:45:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10940085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GideonGraystairs/pseuds/GideonGraystairs
Summary: “It’s okay,” he whispers. “It’s going to be okay.”He almost believes it himself.Songfic for This Is Gospel by Panic! At The Disco





	From Pieces Of Broken Memory

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on [Tumblr](http://raphaelsantiago.co.vu) 07/17/2015.
> 
> Requested by Anonymous as a songfic prompt: If you love me let me go (this is gospel) with your otp :P

 

_This is gospel for the fallen ones_  
_Locked away in permanent slumber_

 

* * *

 

Sometimes, Magnus likes to pretend that Alec loves him and that’s enough. He likes to imagine a world where love conquers anything and there’s no such thing as pain, unless perhaps inflicted on those he doesn’t particularly like. He likes to believe in a magic beyond his own, a cure-all with no end-all, a beautiful land where nothing’s ever broken and therefore no fixing is required. Sometimes, he even just likes to picture a place where the fixing is always easy and always obvious and never fails.

But that’s not the way it really is. It’s really him loving Alec with everything he has and Alec loving him with everything he doesn’t and that not being enough, never being enough. It’s scratches all along pale flesh that he can’t stop even with hands clasped over bleeding nails. It’s pills down the sink, the toilet, and screams of frustration every time another doesn’t work. It’s mirrors smashed and windows covered and doors locked and shouts and sobs and dead eyes staring blankly at a world they don’t want to see anymore.  It’s _nothing working_ , nothing **_ever_** working, and things just breaking into even smaller pieces every time they try to fix them. It’s Magnus and Alec and everything else there with them, ripping them to shreds with sharp claws and the gnashing teeth of reality.

Sometimes, Magnus likes to pretend they can close their eyes and make it all go away even just for a moment. These are the times that scare him the most.

 

* * *

 

_If you love me let me go_  
_‘Cause these words are knives and often leave scars_  
_The fear of falling apart  
_

 

* * *

 

Alec’s hands shake, they always do, and Magnus tries to steady them with a gentle smile and a brush of his own through his hair. Blue eyes dart wildly across the room, fluttering like wings trying to carry him away, and the sound of his breathing grows increasingly rapid as the air draws back. Magnus’s breaths are steady enough for the both of them, though, as are his hands where he moves to curl them over Alec’s.

“ _It’s okay_ ,” he whispers. “ _It’s going to be okay._ ”

He almost believes it himself.

Alec doesn’t, he never does, and Magnus’s inconstant conviction does nothing to reassure him. The clock on the wall ticks past nine, steady and reliable in the way so much of their lives has failed to be. Magnus swallows down the humourless laugh bubbling in his throat, Alec clutches the phone in his hands so hard his knuckles turn porcelain. Magnus wonders if they’ll crack, if he and Alec will, or if maybe they already have. He thinks Alec might be made of fragile china and he might be the snow crunching underfoot.

Soft lips sigh, half-way to a sob, and tired blue eyes lose focus as they find their way to the curtained window across the room. He thinks he might say something, might drop the phone and bury himself in Magnus’s chest and sob like he has every other time they’ve tried this, but he doesn’t. Instead, he stares lifelessly at the crack of sunlight barely filtering through and curls the toes underneath him into the bed-sheets.

Not a single word leaves his lips, but eventually the loosening grip of his hand gives way enough for the phone to slip through with a black screen. Magnus knows if he turns it back on it’ll say his brother’s name with the call screen pulled up, but he doesn’t. He can’t do it, can’t press the green button for him or take his words into his mouth and breathe them out the wrong way. He can’t do it, no matter how much he wants to.

“ _Alec,_ ” he mutters instead, leaning forward to brush his lips against his ear. “ _It’ll do you good to talk to them._ ”

Alec doesn’t have to tell him no or that he’s scared or that sometimes he feels like they’re watching him and already know everything he might think to say; Magnus can hear it in the silence he leaves stretching through the air around them so pungently it’s suffocating to them both.

He’s almost surprised when a cracked voice fills it in a piercing tone. “ _They’re going to see the scars,_ ” he says, voice dazed and eyes still glazed.

And Magnus frowns because Alec doesn’t have scars. Still-healing scratch marks all over his body, yes. A few bruises on his chest, yes. Cracked knuckles that are always bleeding before they ever get a chance to heal, yes. Actual scars? No.

“ _What scars?_ ” he questions warily, running his hands up and down Alec’s arms as he kisses the side of his neck.

“ _The ones they gave me,_ ” Alec whispers, like it’s a secret they can’t let anyone else overhear. Magnus feels the words like a knife in his stomach because he knows, he _knows_ , what he’s talking about. He’s talking about the insults he used to repeat to himself after dark, so familiar they’d been engraved into his very soul. He’s talking about the punchlines to jokes made at his expense and the words he used to dig into his skin with the fine tip of a black sharpie.

They’re not silver on his skin or jagged lines cutting through snow-white. They’re grooves in his brain his thoughts find the paths to far too often and daggers twisting in his heart until it’s nothing but a mangled mess of something that used to be beautiful, before pain was penciled into the definition.

Magnus knows the words the same way he knows Alec’s before he says them. He’d never had to hear them from the mouths that made them, that had been before he’d ever met the beautiful boy he loves so much, but he’s heard them so often in the dark and across his lover’s skin that he could riddle them off by heart.

Alec came from cruelty, misunderstanding. He came from people who called him disgusting and insane when he told them he thought he was being watched. He came from people who called him moronic and pathetic when he couldn’t remember the last week. He came from siblings who couldn’t stop the words, no matter how hard they tried, because they didn’t understand that there was something really wrong with their brother. Something incurable and inconsolable, the kind of thing that grew and grew and grew and could never be stopped or cut off at the root.

Alec came from hatred and denial, disapproval, and sometimes Magnus wonders if maybe that’s the reason he isn’t getting any better.

 

* * *

 

_Don’t try to sleep through the end of the world_  
_And bury me alive_  
_‘Cause I won’t give up without a fight_

 

* * *

 

“ _I’m sorry,_ ” Alec says and Magnus isn’t sure that he knows what he's apologizing for. Maybe it’s the bathtub he’s just pulled him out of or the empty bottle of Thorazine on the soaked tile floor. Maybe it’s the doctors and the drugs and the months where he can’t leave the house, can’t undraw the curtains, can’t even remember who Magnus is. Maybe it’s for loving him and being loved by him― Alec has apologized for that so many more times than Magnus could ever bear to count.

Somehow, he doesn’t think he’s sorry for the water or the pills. He thinks maybe he’s just sorry Magnus found him in time.

“ _You can’t just leave, Alec,_ ” he pleads. He wants to say _you can’t leave me_ , but that feels too unfair, too much like he doesn’t even really acknowledge what’s going on with him. He doesn’t really want him to stay just for him, either, because he knows too well the dangers of living entirely for someone else. “ _You have to try to be stronger than this._ ”

Alec chokes, eyes rolling back in his head as he seizes in Magnus’s arms. Torn nails claw across the tiled floor and Magnus doesn’t want to watch this, doesn’t want to watch what’s left of him disappear in such an awful way, but the ambulance isn’t here and there’s nothing he can do. He can’t even look away, _he can’t_ , because he promised he would never let Alec’s illness scare him off.

So he watches his lover choke and spit and claw and seize and he wants to scream and cry and shout and fall apart. Alec doesn’t have to say “ _I can’t._ ” Magnus can hear it in the way his entire body’s giving in.

He doesn’t bother telling him to fight. Doesn’t bother with long goodbyes or sonnets of lost love or questions of how he could do this to him. He doesn’t bother with any words at all, just holds his trembling body tight and wonders if there was any way this could have turned out differently. He doesn’t think so.

Because, sometimes, Magnus used to think he’d died the moment they’d uttered the word ‘ _schizophrenic’_ like it were a death-sentence.

 

* * *

 

_If you love me let me go_  
_(Oh, this is the beat of my heart, this is the beat of my heart)_  
_The fear of falling apart_

 


End file.
